The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  A.J.H., novelist, 57

  7 ~ Out of the Billiard Halls, Courtesy of Copperplate

  At some point in the mid 1860s, a young man is getting off a train in the American Midwest. The miracle of the railways has made many things possible, and changed the world in unexpected ways. In Britain, only the fact of the railways has required the whole country to adopt a unified, commonly agreed time.* In America, one of the effects is that someone with a good idea can take it round the whole country, gathering disciples by the thousands. One of these good ideas is a particular model of handwriting, and, as time goes on, this one model of handwriting is being taken from place to place, gathering adherents and proponents. This is how to write, if you want to get on. The name of the man who started this wonderful movement is Platt Rogers Spencer; the gentleman who is getting off the train at a station that didn’t exist three years ago must remain anonymous, one of dozens taking the Spencer gospel to new towns, hungry for modernity. I like to think of him as a young man in a sharp Chicago suit, a brown bowler, and a heart full of optimism. He could just about burst into song right now. He’s come to explain to the religious old sharpshooters who have just built a school here just how important it is to make the children write a proper, neat, commercial hand according to the principles of Mr P. R. Spencer; how it’s going to form the clerks, lawyers, schoolteachers and clergymen of the future, and bring aspiration to the fine, upstanding young men and women of the new high school at Dead Man’s Gulch. The apostrophe on the sign is younger than the town: perhaps only the same age as the railway station. Tonight, after explaining the Spencerian principles, he’ll dine off pork and beans in the three-bedroom boarding house, wash his smalls in the shaving bowl on the dresser in his lodgings. Tomorrow, feeling slightly damp about the nethers, he’ll board the train for the next new settlement.

  The copperplate hand survived an extraordinary length of time, considering its many disadvantages to writer and reader. Its fundamental problem is that it takes a style of engraving, not of writing, as its model. Its origin is the engraved lettering which printing could deliver – hence copperplate, engraved on a metal plate. Though it reached its zenith with the evangelical proposals of the nineteenth-century writing masters, it was still going strong in individual hands in the second half of the twentieth century. Even now, it possesses some residual force. Copperplate, or roundhand, emerges triumphant in the eighteenth century. It married two things that the century was rather keen on. In the first place, it was relatively legible, and its flowing movement meant it could (in theory) be written swiftly. Just discernible in the bills of lading that survive from the period is some sort of commercial imperative, to get things done neatly, get them done quickly, and get things done correctly.

  A bill of lading from 1805.

  An example of copperplate from George Bickham’s The Universal Penman, 1743.

  But, at the same time, there is the aesthetic appeal of copperplate, which is of course much more obvious to us. The instructors in penmanship who arose with copperplate, such as George Bickham’s The Universal Penman of 1743, are interested in producing a functional, legible hand, but just as much in teaching pupils how to produce highly elaborate exercises in display. Most obviously, Bickham’s examples pullulate with ornamental borders, as the pen spirals off onto the edges to create a bouquet of flowers or abstract patterns.

  The letterforms enabled this easily. Horizontal bars sprouted loops and arabesques; the crossbars of t’s and f’s look like miniature ski-slopes; ornamental turns of the pen which hardly ever seem the same twice, and which combine, entwine and then shoot off again for no very good reason.

  The aspirational difference between the practical hand-writing we see in private letters of the period and the ‘display’ handwriting with which Bickham sets down some doggerel quatrain, surrounding it with fat-faced putti with pothooks for hair, is not a unique phenomenon. Yesterday, I was watching a perspiring television chef in a competition produce a dish consisting of roasted seabass, strips of cucumber cooked sous vide, elderflower baignets and a lemon foam which looked rather like cuckoo spit, among other untempting components and garnishes. At the same time I was going in and out of the kitchen to give a very basic spag bol a stir or two. That enjoyment of unattainable aspiration while practising a basic version of the art form is not a deplorable thing – I mean, it was a Wednesday night, I’d had a hard day, and at least I was cooking, so it’s not like I was being a total slut or anything. The first readers of Bickham must have been something like that, enjoying the borderline absurdity of Bickham’s ornamental flourishes (‘studiously composed to adorn the Piece’, he sternly instructs us, ticking off more worthlessly extravagant idlers in the penman trade). They probably didn’t make a habit of putting a kiss-curl on every single point of a capital letter F when they wrote a letter to Aunt Margery in the country, any more than they wasted time drawing arabesque doves in the margins. Still, it was probably nice to read books like Bickham’s, do it exactly once, and then conclude it would be nice to do it again some time and improve your life beyond measure, in exactly the same way that I think that one of these days I’m going to sous-vide a cucumber and emerge afterwards a greatly improved and more impressive human being.

  Moral improvement is not exactly the first thing one thinks about when looking at pre-twentieth-century copperplate – when it is neat, it makes one think of Becky Sharp trying to get off with the Marquis of Steyne, and when rapidly executed, it has a definite Sir Mulberry Hawk unhand-me-sir air about it. But moral improvement was exactly what the systematic teachers of copperplate were after as it moved into the nineteenth century. Those who wrote books of instruction in handwriting often have what seems to us an extravagant idea of what better handwriting can achieve on its own. One writer says that he is addressing ‘the young man who is accustomed to spend his evening on the streets or in debauch in the bar-room.’ Instruction in handwriting, and the establishment of ‘artistic penmanship’ in his life can lead to a moral transformation, too. ‘Very soon’ – for the student of handwriting – ‘vulgar stories, bar-room scandals and billiard halls begin to lose their attractiveness.’1 The moral was hammered home by the sententious comments the students were required to copy. One 1846 English copybook contains the smug sentence ‘Poverty is commonly occasioned by misconduct.’2 So how is this unconvincing change from drunken billiard-monger to solid citizen to be effected? Why, by looking constantly at beautiful objects such as a nice rounded o. A Paul Pastner insists that people who study handwriting, however gross, stupid or unwashed to begin with, soon ‘attain such a love for beautiful forms and such a facility in producing them as to really elevate and ennoble their thoughts and lives’. A sentiment which, if I were a Victorian urchin, would persuade me to stay in the gin shop for the rest of my life, making rude marks on the billiard board with a crayon clutched in my fist.

  But the nineteenth-century penmasters had examples of such moral transformations before them. In particular, the man whose work is synonymous with the spread of Moral Copperplate – upright morally, though rightward-sloping graphically – spread the word with stories of his personal redemption through handwriting. Platt Rogers Spencer, born in 1800 in America, devoted his life to spreading copperplate through schools of instruction, countrywide. His mission spread in distinctively redemptive terms. His youth seemed to be directing him towards a religious vocation, but – he never hesitated to explain – his vocation was interrupted by a brief period of alcoholism. He gave up the sauce in his early thirties, and from time to time afterwards would emit a poem giving dire warnings of the effects of drinking on home, prospects, and, no doubt, handwriting. If I can do it, Spencer’s autobiographical legend says, so can you, and he encouraged his followers not just to improve their characters through writing, but to turn their expertise into morally improving schools of their own, run something like a franchise operation.

  There is a certain irony in the fact that Spencerian hand-writing, given to t
he multiplication of curlicues around letters for ornamental purposes, has a far from sober effect on the reader. Some American Spencerians, still operating in a clandestine-sounding manner out of Suite 5 in an office block in Mission, Kansas, declare that ‘America’s Golden Age of Penmanship (1850-1925) produced the most graceful forms of handwriting ever developed by Western civilization.’ (Which is not true, but they’d probably have to give up and move to Mexico if they ever stopped believing it.) Unfortunately, they undermine their commitment with their logo, which renders ‘Spencerian Script’ with so many flourishes about the upper-case S’s that you seem, like Spencer in his pre-teetotal days, to be seeing two S’s where there is only one.3 The same is true of Spencer’s gigantic, hideous, hilarious tombstone (‘in Evergreen Cemetery in Geneva, Ohio, nine miles from Ashtabula’ an indefatigable tracker of all things Spencer tells us).4 * It’s really quite hard to tell what Spencer’s initials, P.R.S. might be – they are curlicued into doubleness, and you look at these elaborate exercises, trying to focus, muttering that you really must lay off the dry sherry.

  Spencer’s moral crusade was conducted on two fronts. The first was a sort of mad transcendental approach to writing. He wasn’t the first nineteenth-century businessman to make a profitable business out of preaching a reliance on nature and simplicity, nor would he be the last. Spencer’s philosophy of the letterforms, expounded in one of those heartwarming nineteenth-century autobiographies to which people unaccountably go on preferring a Dirty Martini and a night in with a DVD box set, was that they all derived ultimately from natural objects. A necessary part of improving letterforms, therefore, was the contemplation of Nature and God’s Bounty. Now, oddly enough, obviously loony as this sounds, it’s not entirely untrue. The Phoenicians, who were the first to produce an alphabet that corresponded to sounds, took an Egyptian sign for water, which does look like an emblematic rendering of waves, and called it ‘mem’, meaning water, and it ultimately became the M of the Roman alphabet.5

  So, yes, there is a demonstrable link between some natural forms and the letters of the alphabet, if you care to go back three thousand years or so. Spencer’s ideas, however, were a good deal less historically minded than this, and a great deal more pedagogical. He would have insisted that the budding penman go to contemplate the waves crashing on the shore before writing the letter M, if it weren’t so obviously inconvenient in many parts of the American Midwest where his business expanded so successfully. Never mind. In ‘the study of Nature . . . the elements of all the letters, in ways without number, enter into the composition of countless objects fitted to delight the eyes of the beholder.’ Where? Oh, well, the Spencerians insisted, you can see the straight line in sunbeams. And there are curves in clouds. And ovals in ‘leaf, bud and flower, in the wave-washed pebble, and in shells that lie scattered upon the shore.’6

  This is a charming picture of Victorians wandering the woods and the shoreline, contemplating the wondrous forms of God-shaped nature before thinking of effecting their moral improvement by writing the word ‘at’ (a rounded pebble, a sunbeam crossing a cloud). It makes them sound like mystic Japanese calligraphers. I don’t suppose there was ever much importance attached to this part of the exercise, however. More to the point was the second aspect of Spencer’s success. Spencer had a network of schools and disciples, propagating the practice of copperplate in brutally effective ways, through drills, routines, handwriting exercises of an almost military precision, and making enough money to pay for a seven-foot hand-carved tombstone with a hideous bas-relief of a signature over a quill at the end of your life, apparently. Before Spencer, penmanship was a leisured, expensive, luxurious accomplishment, like covering screens in Jane Austen, which you would undertake with a hot penmaster if you had the spare time and the money and a general sort of willingness to elope at the back of your mind. After Spencer, writing rigorously and carefully was attainable by many more people. It’s unfortunate that the end result goes on being perfectly hideous, but there you are.

  A Spencerian handwriting chart.

  Spencer worked hard to get his material into schools across America, both business schools and teacher-training schools. He succeeded, to the extent that Spencerian copperplate became, de facto, a national style of writing. Usefully, one of his principal associates became the superintendent of public instruction for New York State. During his life and after his death, his institutions and client institutions expanded constantly, thanks to a highly energetic circle of ‘Spencerian authors’ constantly travelling around hawking series of textbooks. We are told that, at one point, there were no fewer than thirty-eight relations and associates busy on Spencer’s behalf.7

  The appeal of Spencer’s approach was that it was unprecedentedly systematic, analysing letterforms as the combination of various Principles and Elements, demanding an exact understanding of proportion of the lengths of letters above and below The Line. It was embedded in students by means of handwriting ‘drills’, the whole class repeating single Elements together, advancing to the mind-numbing repetition of individual letters, and on to whole words, sentences, and even poems. These poems, as I suggested, were often used to drive home a moral lesson as well as one about the extension of the g below the baseline, or the angle of the t-bar. The surviving student workbooks of the period are filled with daunting sentences about writing well, improving your lot in life, and maintaining a proper fear of death and judgement.

  These drills sound nightmarish, and enthusiasts for the Spencerian method don’t make it sound any more fun by their keen comparisons with military drills. One manual, by one of Spencer’s relations, says that through the Spencerian methods, ‘entire classes may soon be trained to work in concert, all the pupils beginning to write at the same moment, and executing the same letter, and portion of a letter simultaneously.’8 What the point of such simultaneity might be, we are not told, or whether anyone afterwards could tell the difference between two handwritten copies of a sentence written with each ‘portion of a letter simultaneously’, and one written subsequently. It seems unlikely. The main motivation for this craze for simultaneous, drill-like endeavours must have been the same one that encouraged authorities to face the front under a single surveilling eye, to sit upright in exactly the same way, to wear exactly the same clothes, and other grim exercises in control and punitive discipline. The idea was to give the pupil an automatic muscular movement whenever a pen was held and the words ‘A quick brown fox’ had to be written. But the addiction to the idea of simultaneous platoons of sighing juveniles working their loops gives the game away. The real aim was control.

  If you want to see how extreme the desire for control could be, there are some truly terrifying images which survive of patent devices to bind the hand into correct pen-hold. They were termed things like ‘Carstairs’ System’ and tend to be promoted in books called things like L’Arsenal de la Chirurgie.9 The idea that there was a single correct way to hold a pen doesn’t sound encouraging. The nineteenth century was obsessed with such questions of correct physical bearing, from knife-holding at table onwards. (‘Well, ay don’t think they were ducal folk,’ a lady observes somewhere in Jilly Cooper. ‘Because they were holdin’ their knives like pencils.’) It also invented any number of patent devices to promote correctness and constrain the young into the required position.*

  The suggestion that there is only one correct way to hold a pen, walk, cut your meat, or play the piano is a peculiarly persistent one. Personally, I break the rule by resting my pen on the joint of my fourth finger rather than, as penmasters require, on the third or (the ghastly Carstairs’ requirement) just sort of running alongside the index finger without resting on anything. But then again I know precious few pianists who fulfil the parallel requirement to be able to play while resting a book on the flat back of the hand, and the best pianist I know plays by sort of flopping his fingers onto the keyboard in a way which would appal Fanny Waterman. The patent devices invented to constrain and control the body in
different ways must have ruined many more hands and other things than it guided to perfection. The best-known victim of such devices was the composer Robert Schumann, whose early promise as a concert pianist was brought to an end by his investment in a quack’s hand-restricting device. But there must have been many more whose ability to write was actually damaged by such horrible devices as the Edwardian ‘Write-True’ Finger Guide and Pen-Rest and Carstairs’ System, just as endless Edwardian women found their internal organs mashed into each other by the stays and corsets of the period. The aim, as I say, was control and restriction.

  The spread of writing schools happened because copperplate was no longer a leisured, artistic activity, but a crucial way in which people should learn to communicate for practical, business purposes. One nineteenth-century handwriting textbook insists on its importance, indeed, to the less-leisured classes, saying ‘To persons in the lower and middle ranks of life a good and rapid style is of special importance as legible writing quickly executed is in constant requisition in all trades and businesses.’10 Here, we see an important principle of handwriting emerging for the first time – legible writing quickly executed. Almost every writer on handwriting since the late-nineteenth century has puzzled over the balance between speed of execution, and legibility of the result. On the whole, teachers will tell you, there is a trade-off. The faster the handwriting, the less legible the result; the more care that is taken over legibility, the slower the execution.